Squeezing a Few Yuks out of Yiddish

By KEN GORDON

Yiddish with Dick and Jane
By Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman
112 pages. Little, Brown. $14.95.

Shmutzy Girl
By Anne-Marie Balila Asner
20 pages. Matzah Ball Books. $6.95.

The other day a little yellow book entitled Yiddish with Dick and Jane beckoned to me from its heymish pile in the bookstore. I cracked it open and found inside a picture of a bespectacled blond-haired guy taking out the garbage. Watching him from the doorway of a brick-fronted house was his equally blonde wife, who smiled in his direction and wore a blue dress and white apron. The 14-point words at the bottom of the page read:

See Jane.
Jane is married to Bob.
Jane loves Bob very much.
Bob is a real mensch.

I gave a little snort of appreciation and turned the page. I soon found other equally snort-worthy sentences ("See Jane schlep. Schlep, Jane, Schlep. Schlep, schlep, schlep"). It seemed that this book, which is co-authored by the team of Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman and is clearly marked "parody" on the cover, was made for 21^st century Jewish ironists such as myself.

Weiner and Davilman's m.o. is to move Yiddish phrases, and iconoclastic Jewish humor, into Dick and Jane's goyish '50s neighborhood. As it says in the author's note: "We've dragged Yiddish into a book about Dick and Jane—and about the sunny pastoral world they share with friendly milkmen, doctors who make house calls, mommies who wear dresses, and daddies who look no older than eighteen." It works. You'd have to have broken your Jewish funny bone not smile when Dick says, on page 62: "I should give Tom his sand wedge back. He has been hokking me a tshynik about it all week."

What's so funny here?

Yiddish doesn't belong in a children's book, at least not a children's book featuring Dick and Jane. The majority of young Jewish people have virtually nothing to do with Yiddish. In fact, if you’ve got a youngster who knows the difference between having nachas and shpilkes, you should make sure that the kid isn't some time-machine stowaway. Yiddish is for alter kockers. It's a language employed by our grandparents and half-understood by our folks, who passed down to us just a few words and phrases.

This is a book for people with about three handfuls of Yiddish words at their fingertips (Yiddish with Dick and Jane introduces a reader to about 80 words). For secular Gen-X Jews, Yiddish is not about communication, it’s about irony. They quote the Yiddisher Indian Chief in Blazing Saddles (“Loz em gaien!”) to one another as a kind of hyper-ironic code. It would take years of systematic study, not to mention relocation to a real Yiddish-speaking community, to get them any closer to the mameloshn.(Boston, my city, great big Catholic Boston had, in the 1920s, seven Yiddish newspapers. Know how many we got in operation today? Gornisht!)

Now it's clearly too late for Gen X to get all Yiddish on us, but what about their kids? Perhaps there's something for them on the shelves.

Here's where Shmutzy Girl comes in. This slim paperback tome, by a woman named Anne-Marie Balila Asner, is, unlike Yiddish with Dick and Jane, actually for children. Shmutzy Girl is just one in a series of publications from Matzah Ball Books. These books introduce little characters whose Yiddish names are indicative of their essential characters (i.e. Kvetchy Boy and Shluffy Girl). In this volume, Shmutzy Girl learns to accept the fact that she can't help but be shmutzy.

And this is funny?

Sure. Reading the book with a little kid can be hilarious (when else in this American life can one say the word shmutzy over and over again?). And, frankly, I kvell with parental pride when my two-year-old daughter tells me, after a Technicolor bout of painting at her easel, that she's shmutzy.

I'll tell you what else is funny: The way these characters look. The little people in the Matzah Ball Books series are cute little round-headed guys and gals with skinny cartoon bodies. They have no noses, Semitic or otherwise. They all have dark hair, but none of them possess those famously thick and curly Levantine mops. They don’t, in short look much like Jews. But then, in the Dick-and-Jane aesthetic, few characters do. This is funny, but in a way that points out a social issue. Very Jewish.

So this is all good, no? No. After a while, I felt a bit annoyed at these two cute little books. Reading them, laughing at them, revealed to me that my knowledge of Yiddish is pathetic. (I think of how many words of English my daughter knows; the number is far greater than the number of Yiddish words at my command.) Which made me realize that chuckling at these books means laughing at one's ignorance of Jewish culture.

On second thought, you have to have a sense of humor here. The gags in Shmutzy Girl and Yiddish with Dick and Jane aren’t harsh, in fact they’re pickled in self-deprecation. You could say that they’re seasoned with a real knowledge that Yiddish culture, once a living part of Jewish life, is doomed to be a relic of the past, a casualty of Hitler's hatred. Nothing funny about that.

Now I won't beg you to enroll your kids in an intensive Yiddish-language course, or ask you to feel bad about laughing at Dick, Jane, and Shmutzy Girl. But I will suggest that these books might lead you to think a bit about your own relationship to Yiddish. Maybe even lead you to read about the history of Yiddish, or check out the translated work of a Yiddish master such as I. B. Singer.

Nathan Zuckerman, in The Anatomy Lesson, knew the inspirational power of Yiddish. After reading an anthology of Yiddish literature, Philip Roth's protagonist—who was then in the army—bought a used Yiddish grammar and an English-Yiddish dictionary thinking that "by the time he was discharged he would be reading his literary forefathers in their original tongue." Unfortunately, writes Roth: "He managed to stick with it for only six weeks." Zuckerman's inability to hang in there seems standard. (Actually, above-average: six weeks is a long time to be a DIY Yiddishist!) His impatience and eventual failure points to an unfortunate but true fact: it's hard to be Jewish, but it's even harder to read it.

Discussion Question

What do you think the role of Yiddish is in Jewish humor?  How do you feel about the fact that Yiddish is a dying (perhaps almost dead) language? >>